IN any general election, one of the first things people want to know is how many seats have been won by which party.
That is natural, even expected, given what those figures say about the direction the country or a state will take in the next five years or so.
There are, however, other figures related to each general election that are worth paying closer attention to. Some are as follows:
The size of each state legislative assembly varies according to the size of the state and its population. Similarly, the number of parliamentary seats each state gets is governed to some extent by the same factors.
As such, rural constituencies, particularly those in the big states, have smaller electorates than urban ones.
This means that while the MP for urban PJ Selatan, for instance, represents over 70,000 voters, his colleague in the very much larger Hulu Rejang represents some 17,000. The rationale is that the MP in Sarawak has to travel a lot further to meet and serve his constituents.
Given this arrangement, Sarawak has 31 seats in the Dewan Rakyat while Selangor, with twice its population, has 22.
Under the first-past-the-post system practised in Malaysia, there is usually a gap between the number of popular votes received by a party and the number of seats it wins.
Others systems provide for an allocation of parliamentary seats that are more proportionate to the popular votes given to each party. Each system has its pros and cons.
Not everyone who is a registered voter turns up to vote on polling day. This is due to problems with time or distance and also apathy, either because people are not interested or because they feel their votes will not make a difference.
Voter turnout in Malaysia has usually hovered around 70% to 75% over the years.
In comparison, the turnout for the US presidential elections since 1972 has ranged from 52% to 61% while over in Britain, numbers for the parliamentary elections dropped from 77% in 1992 to 59% in 2001 before rising to 61% in 2005.
